Patients should be charged £10 a month to use the NHS, a former Labour health minister says today.

Lord Warner says people should pay a monthly membership fee to use the health service.

And they should pay hotel-style charges of £20 a night if they have to go into hospital.

The suggestion was quickly knocked down by ministers who said the NHS would remain "free at the point of entry".

And a Labour source said: "This is not something we would ever consider."

In a report for the centre-right think tank Reform, Norman Warner said the £10 monthly fee should be collected alongside council tax.

Money should also be raised by charging people the "full cost" for vaccinations for overseas travel together with a "revamped system" of prescription charges.

The report says that, together with a £20-a-night hotel fee for staying in hospital, could raise £1billion a year, while the membership fee would raise more than £2billion a year.

Only those receiving free prescriptions would be exempt from the charges, the report says.

It says NHS funding from general taxation should only rise with inflation to avoid starving the rest of the public sector of resources.

Any additional health funding required should come from an increase in "sin taxes" such as booze and tobacco duty and higher levies on food and drink containing "excessive" amounts of sugar.

"Betting and gambling taxes could also be increased and used on the same basis," the report says.

And it adds that more people should pay inheritance tax to "produce at least an additional £3-4 billion a year for health and care than is currently raised by the tax".

It concludes: "Even with major changes to care, it is now irresponsible to pretend to the public that current forms of taxation alone will be sufficient to provide a good quality health and care system."

Lord Warner said: "We can no longer pay homage to an out-of-date and unaffordable NHS that's unfit for today's and tomorrow's care needs.

"All politicians allowed the NHS to overdose on higher budgets without shifting more care closer to home and concentrating our specialist services on fewer, safer, more highly skilled, 24/7 centres.

"The day of reckoning has arrived with an obesity epidemic on our doorstep.

"The NHS has to change radically and fast over a single Parliament with flat-lined funding.

"It should have no more hand-outs at the expense of other public services.

"It faces a hard slog of doing more with less and a tough conversation with the public about how we change services and accept new ways of funding the NHS."